Poverty versus homelessness is an interesting cognitive reframing of the same fundamental problem.
War, meanwhile is a scalar concept of the platonic idea of conflict in general, between two individuals, but scaled up and beyond the scope of individuals to transcend to rival collectives.
So, cancer. Unsolvable for absolutely everyone, although it can be solved for some, but then dancing around the issue of wealth again.
Here’s where I’d like to stop for a moment, and dispense with the conceptual curveballs being tossed around, because now with wealth as a requirement for diamond sure shots against cancer being accessible only to the wealthy, we’re right back onto the homelessness/poverty concept.
I’m going to cut to the chase: the words “illegal to force someone to take care of themselves” is an extremely misguided framing of what homelessness is. Almost to the point of willful deception. That ain’t what homelessness is.
Okay, sure. You’ve got psychiatric, fractured people walking around in circles, and lead a horse to water, do no harm, you’re idea of compelled assistance is my idea of a cage, and what about all the sociopaths who might game the system like blood sucking parasites. Healthy people need not be beset by the lampreys of willful destruction and self destruction.
But.
The U.S. Marshalls and/or the town sheriff’s department will trot on up to my door with cuffs in hand, and guns drawn, within 45 days of my bank telling someone that I haven’t scored enough paper points to pay tribute to the monarch of my roof. So, under threat of violence, not only is the degree of luxury stripped from my permission to simply exist comfortably, but perhaps I land in a cage. A real cage, not a conceptual economic cage of taxes and regulation. A cage shared with some of the fractured psych cases that might fracture me to match their proclivities and better suit their surroundings.
So, poverty. Back to wealth, yes? Points scored on paper, retained by banks that publish scores to highly available, networked computer databases for live transactions and batch processing.
We’re rapidly approaching a situation where electronic systems, computer software, and related hardware applications will obviate human effort in a wide array of scenarios. Transportation, anything involving sorting, organizing and distribution, rote fabrication and assembly; much of that can be automated, with or without magic decision making buzzwords for the edge cases that are currently mechanical turked with brute force data entry by humans in the loop.
This reorganization, centralized around advanced electronic systems of record and authority will drastically improve efficiency, to simultaneously create surplus and idle humans in one stroke, or many, many concurrent strokes, struck within a very fast, short span of time.
Now, broken humans, stupid humans, evil humans, and even just plain old humans, mediocre, unfuckable, and aged out; such a chore to be around and listen to. Why do anything for anyone that can’t charm your pants off? And then, there’s the biosphere to think about. Do we use automation to unleash a surplus of pollution, garbage, waste and toxicity upon our already fragile planet, but for the want of maximizing a bottomless pit of human activity? Indeed, when we play god, and cure cancer, feed the poor and house the homeless, do we even fix the ugly, mean freaks that no one finds adorable or even mildly interesting?
I think we can draw a bounding box around an extrapolation of all living humans in their current state of affairs, and what it would take to raise the standard of living, and provide a comfortable pasture for all the broken shambles of misfortune that creates poverty and all the mental illness that creates homelessness. We’ll probably even have enough surplus to snip out all those pesky tumors, and mend the festering sores that sprout more. We’ll probably be able to figure this stuff out, granted that biology is merely piles of chemistry, which of course is merely piles of physics, and that highly efficient resource sharing will produce idle humans bathed in surplus, many of whom will be pretty smart, healthy and motivated. My, that’s optimistic, isn’t it?
So, I dunno. I don’t see things your way, but then again, I have to spend eight or more exhausting hours a day, on this treadmill of income chasing to pay rent, eat food, run fool’s errands, commute, idle in front of a cathode ray tube, psychically recovering from the trauma of the stupidity inflicted upon me by this shitty mess of a groundhog’s day rat race, and then sleep for eight hours, so I’m actively prevented from helping you solve the problems you attempt to frame as so bloody insurmountable.
I was being a bit flippant in my comment because I take issue with the phrasing of these problems in the context of 'solutionism.'
We can, and have, eased poverty. Families aren’t having to eat their children as happened in 1920's Russia. We must strive to ease it our entire lives to add meaning, even if we know we will never reach the asymptote for the reasons I mentioned,
We must strive to ease war. Does that mean having a strong police-like presence in the Middle East, or just getting the fuck out? Our own society arose like a Phoenix from extreme violence, at we harming less developed countries by constant intervention in their sectarian violence?
We must strive to ease cancer, because we have to solve this before the heat death of the sun if we wish for humanity to survive afterwards.
War, meanwhile is a scalar concept of the platonic idea of conflict in general, between two individuals, but scaled up and beyond the scope of individuals to transcend to rival collectives.
So, cancer. Unsolvable for absolutely everyone, although it can be solved for some, but then dancing around the issue of wealth again.
Here’s where I’d like to stop for a moment, and dispense with the conceptual curveballs being tossed around, because now with wealth as a requirement for diamond sure shots against cancer being accessible only to the wealthy, we’re right back onto the homelessness/poverty concept.
I’m going to cut to the chase: the words “illegal to force someone to take care of themselves” is an extremely misguided framing of what homelessness is. Almost to the point of willful deception. That ain’t what homelessness is.
Okay, sure. You’ve got psychiatric, fractured people walking around in circles, and lead a horse to water, do no harm, you’re idea of compelled assistance is my idea of a cage, and what about all the sociopaths who might game the system like blood sucking parasites. Healthy people need not be beset by the lampreys of willful destruction and self destruction.
But.
The U.S. Marshalls and/or the town sheriff’s department will trot on up to my door with cuffs in hand, and guns drawn, within 45 days of my bank telling someone that I haven’t scored enough paper points to pay tribute to the monarch of my roof. So, under threat of violence, not only is the degree of luxury stripped from my permission to simply exist comfortably, but perhaps I land in a cage. A real cage, not a conceptual economic cage of taxes and regulation. A cage shared with some of the fractured psych cases that might fracture me to match their proclivities and better suit their surroundings.
So, poverty. Back to wealth, yes? Points scored on paper, retained by banks that publish scores to highly available, networked computer databases for live transactions and batch processing.
We’re rapidly approaching a situation where electronic systems, computer software, and related hardware applications will obviate human effort in a wide array of scenarios. Transportation, anything involving sorting, organizing and distribution, rote fabrication and assembly; much of that can be automated, with or without magic decision making buzzwords for the edge cases that are currently mechanical turked with brute force data entry by humans in the loop.
This reorganization, centralized around advanced electronic systems of record and authority will drastically improve efficiency, to simultaneously create surplus and idle humans in one stroke, or many, many concurrent strokes, struck within a very fast, short span of time.
Now, broken humans, stupid humans, evil humans, and even just plain old humans, mediocre, unfuckable, and aged out; such a chore to be around and listen to. Why do anything for anyone that can’t charm your pants off? And then, there’s the biosphere to think about. Do we use automation to unleash a surplus of pollution, garbage, waste and toxicity upon our already fragile planet, but for the want of maximizing a bottomless pit of human activity? Indeed, when we play god, and cure cancer, feed the poor and house the homeless, do we even fix the ugly, mean freaks that no one finds adorable or even mildly interesting?
I think we can draw a bounding box around an extrapolation of all living humans in their current state of affairs, and what it would take to raise the standard of living, and provide a comfortable pasture for all the broken shambles of misfortune that creates poverty and all the mental illness that creates homelessness. We’ll probably even have enough surplus to snip out all those pesky tumors, and mend the festering sores that sprout more. We’ll probably be able to figure this stuff out, granted that biology is merely piles of chemistry, which of course is merely piles of physics, and that highly efficient resource sharing will produce idle humans bathed in surplus, many of whom will be pretty smart, healthy and motivated. My, that’s optimistic, isn’t it?
So, I dunno. I don’t see things your way, but then again, I have to spend eight or more exhausting hours a day, on this treadmill of income chasing to pay rent, eat food, run fool’s errands, commute, idle in front of a cathode ray tube, psychically recovering from the trauma of the stupidity inflicted upon me by this shitty mess of a groundhog’s day rat race, and then sleep for eight hours, so I’m actively prevented from helping you solve the problems you attempt to frame as so bloody insurmountable.
C’est la vie...